I will keep constant watch over myself andâmost usefullyâwill put each day up for review. For this is what makes life evilâthat none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past.
~ Seneca
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And so Iâve been learning to find the complainer in myself, and bring love to him. This is transformative! It means itâs OK for me to have complaint, to feel put upon, to not be happy or grateful. This is a permission to just be how I am right now â which is sometimes full of complaint.
~ Leo Babauta, from Transforming Our Complaints into Something Generative
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Some days I really wish I could just let go of all this blogging shenanigans. But it does force me to do a lot of reading, and that means I’m periodically reminded to pay attention to what Babauta is saying.
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The fact is one’s own voice is not heard anywhere else. It’s a challenge to be yourself. It makes a lot of courage.
~ Yusef Lateef
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What you realise, the moment you ask âwhat would it mean to be done for the day?â, is that the answer canât possibly involve doing all the things that need doing â even though thatâs the subconscious goal with which many of us approach life, driving ourselves crazy in the process. If there are a thousand things that need doing, youâre going to need to arrive at some definition of âfinishedâ that doesnât encompass them all.
~ Oliver Burkeman, from What would it mean to be done for the day?
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And defining “done” for the day is just the first step. How can I be done at the end of this week? âŚmonth? I need to keep pulling back to larger timeframes to imagine: How do I ever stop having a, “the next thing I should do is⌔?
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Self employment, for me at least, is a never-ending contest between the world’s worst manager and the world’s laziest employee.
~ Daniel Akst
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Whenever anyone tells me that some platform is great, I always nod and think to myself ⌠for now. For now.
~ Bob Sassone, from Bluesky is not going to save you
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I don’t understand why no one else is saying this: Until I see anyone else running separate federation instances, it’s still just another monolithic platform. This again? If the AT Protocol (what Bluesky is built upon) is really great, how do I run my own instance to join the federation?
If you see only one instance, then it’s a platform. When you see multiple instances talking to each other, then it’s a protocol.
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The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
~ Eden Phillpotts
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That was always a huge thing for me. I was so terrible at everything at school; I couldn’t catch a ball, I couldn’t even run without running into a tree. I was pretty uncoordinated. I couldn’t paint or draw, I couldn’t sing, and I thought I was just hopeless at everything. And then I discovered that what I could do was string words together in ways that tickled people.
~ Stephen Fry, from Stephen Fry
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I think my problem was I was too good (not actually good, but not bad enough) at too many things. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have a clear calling like Fry describes.
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There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
~ Shakespeare‘s Hamlet
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Several years ago the idea struck me to try living in the digital world but without digital media. I realised that I used to have all these analogue habits that fell by the wayside as I spent more time online, and thought that six months without digital media would give me the opportunity to focus on more material activities.
~ From Jennifer Rauch on why Slow Media is satisfying, sustainable and smart
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There are, after all, only so many hours in the day. Our choices (or our defaults if we don’t choose) end up determining the quality of our lives.
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The Fourth Rule of the Artistâs Journey is: Itâs for life.
~ Steven Pressfield, from The Artistâs Journey Is a Lifetime Engagement
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Because that means there’s not going to be an end, so I better get my stuff sorted.
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From the moment food touches your tongue to the time it leaves your body, your digestive system and gut microbiome work to extract its nutrients. Enzymes in your mouth, stomach and small intestine break down food for absorption, while microbes in your large intestine digest the leftovers.
~ Christopher Damman, from Is weight loss as simple as calories in, calories out? In the end, itâs your gut microbes and leftovers that make your calories count
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That’s about the greatest summary I’ve ever read. The rest of the article is good too. Definitely not too long, and worth the read.
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The first thing Iâd like to point out is that the left and right sides of the energy balance equation could both be giving orders, and both be taking orders. The two possibilities arenât mutually exclusive. And I think you can make a case for it going both ways.
~ Stephan Guyenet, from The science of body weight and health
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âŚbut you should. Because the answer (to why we get fat) is complicated. There is no single, simple-to-control, cause and effect.
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But what most energizes Walley is gathering stories that reveal the trauma left-behind industrial workers have suffered. She is also focused on how to prevent such devastating fallout, which can stoke the kind of social and political unrest thatâs roiling the U.S. as mining and manufacturing jobs disappear. âThis stuff is talked about through things like statistics. People donât get a sense of what it actually felt like,â Walley says. âConveying it through stories gives a whole different perspective.â
~ Elizabeth Svoboda, from Life and Death After the Steel Mills
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At one point, the area where I grew up was dominated by a steel mill. Then, slowly over time, it suddenly wasn’t.
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Another big hurdle is the time and effort it takes to schedule a gathering. In recent decades, participation in groups that allow friends to meet up easilyâsuch as unions, civic clubs, and religious congregationsâhas dwindled. âOne of the really great things about these institutions is they regularize contact,â Cox told me. âYouâre there at the same time or for the same kind of meetings ⌠with shared values and expectations for behavior. So it really takes a lot of the work off the plate of the individual.â
~ Olga Khazan, from The Friendship Paradox
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I’ve often thought about social things I could do to encourage bumping into more potential friends. But I have the cart before the horse: We used to have social things we simply did for the sake of those things, and it just happened that we ended up with a lot of friends (of various degrees of closeness.) It doesn’t work to seek friends by trying to hack which social things to do.
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Not every time that we talk about consciousness are we talking about experience. Sometimes âconsciousnessâ refers to awakeness. When youâre asleep at night, or blacked out from too much to drink, youâre not conscious in this sense of the term. Alternatively, sometimes âconsciousnessâ refers to awareness. Itâs this kind of consciousness that you lack when youâve zoned out while driving. Youâre awake, but not youâre not fully aware of your surroundings. Itâs also this kind of consciousness that activists target when they engage in the process of consciousness raising.
~ Amy Kind, from How to think about consciousness
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I no longer get stuck wondering where did my consciousness come from when I was born. Nope. I’m now stuck on: Where does it go every night when I fall asleep. âŚand where does it come from each morning that I awake?
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Ever since Plato started telling stories about people trapped in caves, philosophers have pondered the relationship between the mind and reality. How can we be sure that the world we think we know is the real world? After all, weâve all been mistaken before â a person in a store window might turn out to be a mannequin, or two lines that appear to be curved might actually be parallel â so how can we be certain we know reality as it truly is?
~ D J Hobbs, from How to think like a phenomenologist
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I’m not sure I want to think like a phenomenologistâŚ
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Until now, she said, the history of medicine has been the history of doctors, whose priestly wisdom has been delivered to clueless, passive recipients as if it was gospel. Cousinsâs story reversed that. Psychiatrists had asked him to map his moods for three months, so he developed a simple means to do it online every day and share his mood map with friends. They provided a supportive network, a bit like Weight Watchers. His moods immediately started to improve and became more stable: the act of monitoring had itself produced an effect.
~ John-Paul Flintoff, from Thereâs an app for that
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I particularly like, “the overexamined life is not worth living,” twist on that old phrase.
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So why did we evolve a large brain if it wasnât essential for toolmaking? One reason is that existing in a large social group is very mentally taxing. Those who are better at playing the social game will have more access to mates and resources and will be more likely to reproduce. As the groups get larger, so the computational power needed to keep up with the interconnections grows exponentially, as does the stress.
~ Mark Maslin, from Why Humans Are So SmartâAnd So Stressed Out
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I’m too often stressed out (ever / at all is too often!) It helps to get really clear on what exactly is stressing me out. Because the complexity of relationships is a featureânot a problemâof our expansive, beautiful, wonderful, modern world.
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So you think your choices have reasons behind them and, if these reasons are good ones, then you think that others, in principle, could see this, too. You recognise in yourself, and think that others should recognise in you, a choice aimed at something worth seeking, and a choice by someone who can make that call. This means that what you are after is âgoodâ not just in a sense confined to you, but visible to everyone. Once the goodness of your choice is visible to everyone, it is a kind of absolute goodness â a goodness that anyone could recognise.
~ Christine Korsgaard, from Philosophers and other animals
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Really complex. The road to hell is marked by unconsidered decisions.
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